I’m a watch guy. I love watches. I started wearing a watch when I was 10 years old. Today I own about eight watches that I wear on a regular rotation depending on the occasion. I love the chronograph face with a stainless steel band. It’s an expensive habit, which is why some of my watches are authentic and some of them I picked up in Thailand and they look and feel very good. The first watch I remember buying was the Casio Knight Rider watch. I was obsessed with that show and wanted a cool watch I could talk to. Fast-forward 25 years and this has become a reality.

Overall I’m very impressed with the Apple watch. For a first generation product I think they have nailed it. I went with the 42mm black sport watch because I hated all the stainless steel bands they were offering. My plan is to find a black metallic band that matches the watch. I also didn’t want to spend over $400 on a first gen product that will be obsolete within a year.

Here is my take on the watch:

-Comfort – the black sport band is very comfortable and light. I’m used to wearing heavy big face watches so this almost feels like I’m not wearing anything.

-Screen size – I think the 42mm is adequate for displaying information. I have big fingers so sometimes I miss the small icons on the home screen.

-Watch face – they have an assortment of faces that you can pick and customize which was pretty simple to do. Naturally, I went with the chronograph look with temperature, timer, battery life, and daily exercise tracker displayed at each corner.

-Battery life – At the end of my day I usually have about 50% battery life left. I suppose this could last almost 2 full days. Ideally I wish it could last 3-4 days so one wouldn’t have to worry about packing a charger on a weekend getaway.

-Messages – this is probably the single reason I bought this watch and I’ve already taken advantage of it several times. You’re sitting in a long meeting with a customer and you have stored your phone away out of respect and to prevent distractions. All the sudden you get a little buzz on your wrist. With a quick glance at my wrist I can see who just texted me and if I want to reply I can quickly respond with a yes, no, or other predefined answer. If you don’t like one of the predefined messages you can speak into the watch and the voice-to-text has gotten really good. The watch will give you the option to send it as an audio message or text. Sending heartbeats and drawing stuff isn’t that interesting. You’re also limited to the people in your favorites list. I tried to add more people to my favorites list but they wouldn’t show up on my watch, probably a bug.

-Calls – this may also be the second best feature of the watch. Not for taking a call on your wrist because that is stupid but for knowing who is calling you. Again, you’re sitting in a meeting and you hear your phone vibrating. Everyone in the room hears your phone vibrating. A quick glance at your watch will show you who and give you the ability to end the call. If that person continues to call you it will go direct to voicemail and there will be no further disturbance. Taking a call on your watch will only work if it’s going to be a short call and there is no background noise. It gets very tiring holding your wrist to your ear and mouth.

-Siri – As I mentioned the talk-to-text is very good so Siri can understand you pretty well. It’s pretty helpful to ask “where is…” and “what is…” questions. Overall i’m pretty impressed and as you can see below Siri still has her sense of humor!

-Activity tracker – This allows you to set your own personal goals based on calories, exercise, and amount of standing per day. I don’t think the calories and exercise is that accurate but the stand feature is pretty cool. While I write this piece on a four hour flight to Chicago I’ve been reminded several times to stand up for a while. This is key during those super busy days at work.

-Apple Pay – this is really cool. I can buy stuff with my watch and this doesn’t require my phone to be on me.

-Maps – not impressed with this at all. One it’s Apple Maps which inherently sucks but it’s also very slow to load and get going. I did use it often in Chicago to figure out where I’m going and it was pretty good although sometimes you can’t figure out which direction you need to start walking in.

-Other apps – I’m not a big app guy so I haven’t played around with that many apps yet. So far I like the Shazam app cause you can’t quickly figure out what song is playing or movie you’re watching without reaching for your phone. I also like the yelp app to quickly find a place to eat or drink

There are rumors that the next Apple Watch will feature a camera for Facetime. I can see that being a pretty cool “the future is here” moment. Overall what I love the most about the watch is that I feel free from my phone. Even though I need the phone for a lot of these features to work, in my tiny condo I can leave my phone on a desk and roam around the house without being worried if I’m going to miss a call or a message.

The smartphone had a huge impact to the PC market. I believe the smartwatch will shake things up in the watch market. As the smartwatch becomes more feature rich and essential to health functions, I think the watch market is going to take a major hit. Those who wear expensive watches today may own several different kinds. With the smartwatch being your daily watch, the watch you wear 95% of the time, will people buy more than one expensive watch?

It’s been about 60 hours since my iPhone 6 – 64GB was delivered to my house. I’ve had an opportunity to use it like I normally would and give me initial feedback. But before I do, it’s important to understand I initially ditched my Apple 4s for a bigger screen. At the time (May 2013), the Samsung S4 was hands down the best phone on the market. Even the iPhone 5 couldn’t beat it, hence why Samsung’s market share grew so fast and now apple has two phones, each with larger screens.

I do believe that the iPhone 6 has regained the champion status for the best phone on the market. Here is what I love about the phone:

First glance, it looks identical to my Samsung S4. Apple even moved the shutdown button to the same location on the right side. It’s a little taller, almost same width, and thinner that my S4. However, the moment you pick this phone up your senses tell you this is made of high quality unlike the cheap plastic feel of the S4.

Fingerprint reader – When I heard of this feature on the 5s I didn’t think much of it. I secure my phone with a passcode but typing a passcode every time is annoying. It’s nice to pick up your phone and put your finger there to see it quickly unlock.

Dictation – Siri might still be useless for most things but at least she now understand what I’m saying. I can now talk my texts and the iPhone does a really good job understanding what I’m saying. This is great for driving.

Camera – The camera is fast and takes crip pictures. It has come a long way but still not perfect. Some idiot on Techcrunch said this camera is good enough to replace your point and click. I disagree. I have an awesome Canon SX700HS that takes amazing pictures with very little light and a lens that can zoom to the other side of the world. We went out last night with some friends and I took pictures in a low light setting with and without the flash and while they’re better than any previous phone, still can’t touch a point and shoot.

Speed – this phone is fast. This seems to be the case with all new phones and over time software updates bog them down but this is definitely the fastest phone I’ve experienced.

Texting images and video – you take this for granted until you leave Apple. With my S4 I could never text more than 2 images at a time. I couldn’t even try to text a video. Apple just takes care of that for you with smart compression and iMessage.

Screen – It is bright and crips. I love the way the text reads on it.

Airdrop – while I haven’t used it yet but this can be useful and so easy to use when transferring large files between phones.

Things I’m not impressed with:

Battery life – At the end of each day I have about 18% left. Which is great for now but we all know new phone batteries are great but after about 3 months they are greatly shortened which means in Nov/Dec I’ll be recharging midday.

Bugs – I’ve already experienced a couple minor bugs in message and safari. I had to kill the app to resolve the issue. I’m sure they’ll be fixed soon but it seems like this OS wasn’t fully ready. If you’re on the fence to upgrade to iOS 8, I would wait for an update.

Pandora – My Alpine Nav has Bluetooth Pandora and this phone/iOS doesn’t work with it. Now I need to ping Alpine to see if they have an update.

I do miss a few things about my Andourd/S4 that I hope Apple will “borrow”:

Options buttons – just left of the home button there is an options button that will pop up a menu in the app you’re in to quickly configure stuff. This just makes it easier to quickly change settings.

Google Live – Even though it was creepy that google was reading my emails and calendar, it would provide some great info. Like that time it notified me that my mom’s flight was canceled before her airline even knew it!

Widgets – I think widgets are really cool and a very easy easy way to get information. Mac OS has widgets, I’m surprised this hasn’t been brought over yet.

Notifications – Apple has come a long way but Android still does notifications better.

The cloud is a very popular option for many enterprises, and most are diving into the cloud at some level. However, on-premises systems still dominate, and are still the preferred choice for most applications, says a recent survey of over 2,000 executives across the globe.

Conducted by 451 Research and released by Microsoft, the survey finds more than 45 percent of organizations consider themselves to be beyond the pilot phase, with 32 percent with a formal cloud computing plan as part of their overall IT and business strategy. At least 24 percent consider their enterprises to be “heavy” cloud users at this time.

That leaves a majority of enterprises on the fence to adopting the cloud. Many CIOs see their datacenter infrastructure as a sunk cost and want to get the ROI the sales rep in the shiny suit promised them. They want to utilize the cloud more as 44 percent of executives admitted that there are a lot of off-budget purchases or implementations of cloud taking place within their enterprises. A lot of these purchases are going towards new applications but what does IT do with their huge datacenter investment? Here are some of the challenges IT faces today:

Large sunk cost in datacenter

Growing demand of application

Large delta between peak and off-peak (why build out for peak?)

The only way to keep your existing datacenter and extend out into the cloud is by taking a “hybrid cloud approach”. This gives IT the best of both worlds as they keep using their existing datacenters but no longer need to build out for the 8-10 hours of peak traffic per day. Instead, they can leverage technologies like Realtime’s Dynamic Cloud Manager (DCM) to manage their datacenter and extend out to the cloud on demand. DCM is the only real-time cloud manager that can manage both your on-premise and extend continuity into the cloud based on your business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The most common scenarios IT is faced with today are:

Scenario #1 – Datacenter (virtual servers) extend to Cloud. In this scenario DCM can be used to manage the VMs in your datacenter. As demand increases DCM will monitor KPIs and additional VMs will be created to manage demand. Once the datacenter capacity threshold is met, DCM will start creating additional VMs into the external cloud. DCM will continue to monitor both environments and properly allocate VMs as needed. The benefits of this scenario include:

Lower costs by keeping datacenter for off peak capacity and using cloud elasticity during peak demand

Automate the process for faster response and removing human error

Disaster Recovery – should datacenter go down DCM can divert to the cloud and vice versa.

Lower electricity cost in datacenter

Share a pool of VM licenses among multiple business units to lower license costs

Scenario #2 – Datacenter (physical servers) extend to Cloud. In this scenario DCM can be used to monitor KPIs of the applications running in the datacenter. Once DCM determines the datacenter capacity threshold is met, DCM will start creating VMs in the external cloud environment. DCM will continue to monitor both environments and properly allocate VMs as needed. The benefits of this scenario include:

Lower costs by keeping datacenter for off peak capacity and using cloud elasticity only when datacenter capacity threshold is met

Automate the process for faster response and removing human error

Disaster Recovery – should datacenter go down DCM can divert to the cloud.

In summary, the tools and technology exist to bridge the gap between your current infrastructure and leveraging the highly scalable and highly available low cost cloud. There is no reason to build your datacenter to handle infrequent peaks nor does it make sense for everyone to be deployed fully in the cloud. DCM is the perfect bridge to maximize your existing infrastructure while providing the benefits of the cloud. To learn more about DCM, feel free to reach out to me and my team of cloud experts here.

We can argue what the cloud is and when it was actually created but this guy does a good job giving a quick history of cloud computing. In summary, in 2002 Amazon started their web services offering with just storage and computation. It wasn’t until 2006 when they launched their elastic compute cloud and revolutionized the way everything works on the Internet today. To me, cloud means a subscription based service that has unlimited scalability.

Since 2006, a lot of others have been trying to compete with Amazon and bring a competitive cloud offering to market. Some have been successful and some have failed but to this date Amazon is by far the leader in this space. Many enterprises and even government is starting to slowly adapt the cloud while others want complete control of their environment and are trying to build a private cloud.

Regardless if you’re trying to build a public, private, or hybrid cloud, there are 3 key components needed to make this happen:

1) Hypervisor or Virtual Machine. This component takes care of bootstrapping the virtual servers. Examples are Xen, KVM, VMWare and Hyper-V used in Amazon, Cloudstack, Openstack, and VMWare.

2) Configuration Management tool. This component takes care of configuring the newly bootstrapped virtual server to make sure all the required software is properly installed and configured to play nicely with the other existing virtual servers of the same cluster. If you have a complex configuration you can use Chef or Puppet to ensure it is properly loaded.

3) Auto-scale tool. This component monitors the SLA through metrics (or KPIs) like the CPU usage, memory usage, overall service latency, etc and decides when to launch a new virtual server using the hypervisor and then configures it according to the instructions in the configuration manager. This tool is more of an orchestrator of the two previous components, similar to the role of a maestro.

Sounds pretty straightforward right? Why is this such a challenge to all those competing with Amazon? The challenge is the auto-scale component. Using something that is intelligent enough to know when to scale up and down virtual instances is the key feature of a viable cloud offering. Most of the auto scaling tools on the market are looking at indicators such as CPU and Memory usage which don’t paint the entire picture of what the end user is experiencing.

Anyone providing a Something as a Service (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc) needs to meet high availability Service Level Agreements (SLA) that are often tied to their business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This could be an availability or performance SLA. For example, when the engineers at Realtime.co were tasked to build a highly scalable Pub/Sub messaging platform offering the lowest latency across the globe, they took a look at all the auto scaling tools on the market but couldn’t find one that was customizable to their specific KPIs such as latency, number of concurrent users, and number of messages. So they decided to build their own auto-scaling tool and this is when Dynamic Cloud Manager (DCM) was born.

DCM is the only real-time dynamic cloud manager that can scale your application infrastructure based on the KPIs that are important to your business. DCM is the missing piece to build a truly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offering that could compete with the best of them.

To learn more about DCM, feel free to reach out to me and my team of cloud experts. Email me here.

If you think about it, you can pretty much do the same thing on your little smartphone than you can on your computer so why would anyone bother firing up their computer to checkout a website? This is exactly where the problem is. The desktop web has become so boring that you can get the same experience, if not better, on a mobile device. We don’t prefer to watch TV on our small screen. TVs just get bigger and bigger. I used to have a 37” TV but now I have a 60” TV. The problem is the lack of significant innovation on the web since AJAX was born in 2005. We’re still stuck on Web 2.0 with the same technologies of nine years ago. In the last nine years website have gotten smarter, faster, and more advanced but the experience has remained the same: boring.

Desktop vs Mobile

It’s time for innovation. It’s time for a new way we interact with websites based on a completely personal experience. The underlying technology to support this exists today in Websockets. Websockets are unique because it creates a direct, full duplex (send and receive on a single connection) connection between the web browser and the web server. The Websocket protocol makes possible more interaction between the browser and web site, creating the ability to provide a unique experience for every visitor. Some of these possibilities include:

Pushing specific content to user (audio, video, images, text). Imagine providing a VIP experience to a specific user based on their behavior on your site

Creating a text, video, or voice chat engagement with the user

Providing content based on mouse position (no clicks). Imagine an online shopping experience based on just moving your mouse around without having to click or drag.

Direct user-to-user interaction in real time (chat, group chat, live polls, live comments, etc).

Engaging real time dashboards and SaaS applications

The possibilities are endless to create a Web 3.0 experience. Although it’s still early, we’re starting to see some momentum in this field with publishers such as the NY Times and Huffingtonpost. All we need are some brilliant ideas of what to do with these capabilities and some smart developers to make it happen. The goal is to make a more engaging web experience that requires a larger screen to consume. I am currently seeking out such people to help bring the web back to life and change the way we interact with the web.

They say once a laptop is 3-4 years old it is basically considered obsolete. I disagree with that statement. Manufactures may want to awe you with new features so they can sell more laptops but I don’t think the laptop has made any significant technological advancement in the last 3-4 years the way smartphones and tablets have. The only thing that has changed in the last 3 years is we access more applications through web browsers than before so the processing power has shifted from the PC to the “cloud” and thus our browsers have become memory hungry and less processor dependent. In this blog I will show you how to add new life to your 3-5 year old laptops instead of shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a new one.

I purchased my 13” MacBook Pro on September 2009. It is now over 4 years old but I love this laptop. It still runs great and does everything I need it to do. This laptop is equipped as follows:

The only two complaints I have is that I am running out of hard drive space and I sometimes see the “beach ball” due to memory intensive applications. The newest MacBook Pros are offered with a 2.5 Ghz Intel i5 CPU with 4GB of 1600 Mhz memory and 500 GB hard drive for $1,200. They offer slightly faster CPU and memory, but no significant changes from my laptop. It’s a fact the slowest component of a computer is the hard drive. Reading and writing to disk is much slower than memory or CPU. In the last couple of years the pricing of Solid State Drives (SSD) have decreased significantly however they are still considerably more expensive than traditional drives. Swapping out your traditional drive with an SSD will improve the performance of your computer noticeably. As a result you will experience faster boot times, faster loading of applications, searching for emails, content, etc. Also, increasing your memory from 4GB to 8GB is a must these days when we simultaneously have multiple applications, browsers, tabs, and windows open.

I wanted to increase my storage to 1 TB so I can have all my photos, music, and (some) video on my laptop and not rely on my external storage. While SSD is available in 960GB, it is very expensive ($500) and to me it’s not worth dumping that much money into a 4-year-old laptop. Instead, Seagate makes a hybrid drive that is part SSD and part disk. At $100 for a TB this is the better choice. Secondly, I purchased 8 GB of memory from Crucial and used their system scanner to make sure I’m buying the correct part for my computer.

Installing these parts is very easy and there are a lot of DIY guides on the internet showing you step by step instructions. I highly recommend while you have your laptop open to clean out any dust that has built up over the years, especially around the CPU and the fans. This will help keep your system cool and improve battery life. Also, if you battery life is shot because of the old battery than this would be a good time to replace your battery. Also, spend some time cleaning your laptop, the keys, screen, and outer case. It’s not gonna feel new if the keys are still sticky🙂

Conclusion:This was the best $200 spent. My computer now feels like new. It boots much faster than before, applications load faster, and I’m able to keep lots of applications open at the same time. I now have 750 GB of space free so I’m worried about running out of space anytime soon. I can easily keep this laptop around for another 3-4 years.

Bonus:If you’re on a Mac, you can upgrade to OSX Maverick for free which has made my computer faster all around.

I’ve always blogged about cool technologies out there and today I’d like to blog about the launch of my fiancee’s new business – Little Trendsetter. They used some really cool technology to get their business off the ground so quickly, more on that later. Her and her partners have a great eye for fashion and have put together a collection of nice clothing at reasonable prices for moms and dads to buy their little ones. Not everyone cares about how cute their kids looks but I’ve noticed a lot of parents pay a lot of attention to the details of their kid’s clothing so I think they’re onto something.

LIttle Trendsetter

If I had a kid and after recently watching Man of Steel – I would definitely get him this Superman shirt.

Superman

If I had a little girl I can see her showing off in this leopard dress.

Leopard Dress

I once bought some shoes for my friends kids and they were too expensive for such tiny things. Little Trendsetter has some really cute shoes at a very good price!

Every kid needs this for the summer:

The Gardner

The Tech part: They were able to launch their business within 2 months. Majority of the time was spent on finding the best inventory. They were able to leverage Shopify’s ecommerce platform (SaaS) to quickly bring their business online. They bought a pretty cool theme and did most of the work themselves and I pitched in here and there. I’m very impressed with how easy Shopify makes it. This is the perfect example of using the Cloud or SaaS to bring a business from zero to launch in a very short time. Now all they have to do is drive people to their site to buy stuff🙂. This is where you come in…hint…hint🙂

Shopify has a very robust platform. You can quickly and easily add new modules or Apps. For example last night I was copying and pasting javascript code to install their Yotpo review app. Having reviews online is an absolute must. This app goes even further to automatically email the buyer to remind them to review the product!

Anyways, check out the site and help support her business by blogging about it, sharing it on facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. Much love! http://www.littletrendsetter.com

I’m a technology enthusiast and I get excited by cool tech things. The cell phone has evolved into the most important gadget you own so it’s important to be extremely picky with the phone you keep within an arms reach as 90% of people do. For me, I need to own the most advanced phone on the market. When I purchased the iPhone 3s and 4s, they were hands down the best phone on the market at the time of their release. When the iPhone 5 was released, it was no longer the undisputed king. Since my 4s, the Droid phones have come along away, specifically Samsung Galaxy. When I went on my phone hunt in May 2013 I considered the HTC One and the Samsun Galaxy S4. Impressed with the Galaxy S3, I knew the S4 would be awesome and after playing with both HTC One and S4 the At&t store, I chose the S4.

First Impression: The screen is just awesome, the colors are vibrant. It is the perfect size for a mobile phone. It’s not a mini ipad like the Note and I don’t think the iPhone 5’s screen is big enough. The phone is fast, it has a lot of memory, you can run many apps simutaonsly without noticing any lag, games like Real Racing 3 and Dead Trigger are so much fun to play. The LTE is a game changer compared to the “4G” on my iPhone 4s.

Hiccups: Switching from iOS to Android isn’t exactly easy. The Android OS is far more configurable so there definitely is a learning curve. When setting up my new phone I immediately had some major issues. 1) My wifi connection at home kept disconnecting and 2) Samsung’s Kies application (wanna be iTunes) wouldn’t recognize my phone on my mac. After a long call into Samsung’s support I learn that the phone has wifi issues to some routers and that Android phones don’t play well with the Mac. This was a big slap in the face. One thing about Apple you know everything will work. The experience of getting a new phone and setting it up is so easy and effortless. Well not so much for Samsung. The S4 is still very new so hopefully there will be a firmware update soon to fix these issues. Until then I have turned wifi off and just use LTE which is just as fast and I haven’t put much music on my phone yet. The 3) issue was Yahoo Mail. It doesn’t work with the built in mail client. You have to download Yahoo’s own email app. This was very strange to me but I guess Google doesn’t want you using the competitor’s mail program. Again these are issues you would never see on Apple.

Review: After owning the phone for 3 weeks and using it, here are my thoughts on the phone and comparisons it with my iPhone 4s.

Size is great. The larger screen makes the web experience much better. While larger, the phone is a lot thinner than my 4s and so fits nicely in my pocket.

Email – After setting up our company’s exchange certificate, the phone quickly synced and I had access to my email, contacts, and calendar. I think it handles exchange better than iOS. Using Swift keyboard has much better autocorrect than the iphone which makes typing much easier.

Camera – The camera is really good. Can it be better? of course. I think the smartphones still struggle in low light situations but this camera is much better than the the camera on my iPhone.

Cool features – this phone is packed with a ton of cool features and sensors. You’ve probably seen the commercials. While cool by design, most of them aren’t practical to always leave on.

OS – I’m still getting used to the Android OS but I like the widgets I can put on my home screen so I can quickly google, see scores, weather, stocks, etc. For my locked screen It shows me a different city every 3 hours so I’m tempted to travel again.

Battery Life – so far so good, it lasts about a day and half under normal use. This phone has a removable battery so I could buy extra and live forever…

Phone – sound quality is great. can easily hear people and people can hear me loud and clear. Using the Smart to dial is the fastest way to dial since my Blackberry which you could just start typing their name. With Smart dial you go to to phone keypad and dial the letters of the name and the contacts name comes up, avoiding the long list of contacts we have due to facebook and gmail integration.

I found this link very helpful 50 tips and tricks: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2251491

Overall I’m happy with my decision. Although I have the unlimited data plan, I hope they fix the wifi issue soon. Kinda funny how I went from a 4S (iPhone) to a S4(Galaxy). There is still a lot I’m learning about this phone and I have yet to do my first S-beam.

Last week a new startup, DollarShaveClub.com, launched with a hilarious video done by the co-founder who has stand up comedy experience. You can see the video here:

Great Video but big problem – their website become unresponsive. My browser kept turning its wheels trying to load the page but it was unable to grab any content from the site. The site wasn’t down, it was just overwhelmed with the thousands of requests coming in all at once causing it to become unresponsive. I was so interested to see their site I logged back in at 1:30 am Pacific time and was finally able to see most of the the site, although it was painfully slow.

The other video that launched last week that went super duper viral, breaking all kinds of records was the Kony 2012 video:

Their site also went down and was acting funny. It was obvious they were hosted on Amazon because you could see the direct s3 domain name in the hostname instead of the invisible children.com hostname.

As mentioned, the problem here is you have this one server (or multiple) trying to serve content to thousands and 10s of thousands of users at the same time. As we noticed, these servers were simply overwhelmed with the amount of users trying to access them at the same time. This requires a distributed massive server infrastructure (2 or more locations) to properly serve all of the requests. The issue with this is that it is a complete waste of money to build out this huge infrastructure for just a launch or a spike in traffic that may occur once in a while. The real solution is to put a serious Content Delivery Network (CDN) in front of your server to cache your website’s content close to the end users and serve the content without ever going back to your server – providing you with offload, scalability, availability, and performance.

So next time you make or intend to make a viral video, make sure your there is a reputable CDN sitting infront of your website.

Charlie Oppenheimer recently published a blog titled Which is less expensive: Amazone or Self-hosted? This very well written and thought out blog has been getting a lot of attention so I thought I would share it here on my blog and of course, add my 2 cents.

1. Labor costs – He leaves them out in this comparison for simplicity sake. While I agree this is a fixed cost, I want to point out that this cost is definitely not even on both sides so it’s very difficult to omit this from both sides of the comparison. Trying to compute this cost is extremely difficult as there are so many factors involved. Make an assumption that the fixed cost could me much higher on the self hosting side.

2. Spiky Traffic – Charlie mentions how this comparison is for a company that is further along and traffic is predictable. If you’re a startup you should be using the cloud since it’s less expensive (with labor) and can much better accomodiate spiky traffic. If your traffic is very spiky, you should seriously consider putting a CDN infront of this to cut down on the traffic served from your origin and allow you to be more scalable.

My Recommendations:

New Startups – Start in the cloud, Amazon or Rackspace is a great starting point. Put a free CDN like CloudFlare in front of it to handle basic caching and basic security.

Growing Startups – Stay in the cloud but bring in a CDN that can handle a bigger load and delivery your dynamic pages, I would recommend Edgecast or Akamai.

Established companies – Your traffic is for the most part predictable and at this point you prob have a full time IT staff so moving to a hybrid model is ideal. What I mean by hybrid is be self hosted but use a cloud player like Akamai to help deliver your content and sites very fast locally and globally. Akamai can provide some serious offload to your infrastructure and allow you to scale for traffic spikes. Akamai can also provide security against DDoS and web application attacks.